Wedding Bell Blues (12 page)

 

Chapter Seventeen

Monday morning Ida Plum came in the back door saying she'd been by the jail to take Reba some underwear but nobody was there. “Gone,” she said. “That cell was as empty as my pocketbook.” Ida Plum liked to work Sundays but I had been the one to work yesterday. I had to
make
her take time off during the week to compensate. She said weekends were lonely for widows.

She was earlier than usual and we didn't have to start doing breakfast yet. Breakfast was at eight a.m. and not a minute before. No self-respecting guest would cruise downstairs and stand outside my dining room's French doors before eight a.m. Not unless they'd alerted me verbally the night before or when they checked in or left a note on my desk or bedroom door.

Ida Plum said the door to the jail cell in the basement of the courthouse was not only open, but also hanging loose on its hinges. If Ossie had assigned someone to stay with Reba, they'd left. Had somebody sprung Reba or had she jiggled the door and found the whole thing rusted to the point where mere touch could make the door fall open?

The question hung between us when Malinda popped in on her way to work at Gaddy's. Not a lot of business this early, Malinda had said, but somebody had to be there on pharmacy duty. Plus she could catch up on paperwork in the quiet.

“So where do you think she is?” Malinda asked after Ida Plum repeated her story about Reba being out and on the loose. Malinda put whole wheat bread in the toaster, opened the refrigerator for some of the mock strawberry jam made with strawberry Jell-O and figs. Tastes better than the real thing. I'd made jars and jars of it last summer with the bounty from my grandmother's fig tree. Not a bush, this fig was a tree that almost blocked the gate to the backyard. I loved figs raw, washed with dew and resplendent on a plate for breakfast. Or with cheese for a four o'clock snack. I loved figs plucked straight from the tree to my lips. I made the jam for guests at the Dixie Dew because it was such fun and so very, very easy.

“Anybody try looking for Reba at her tree?” I asked, pouring coffee into blue mugs. Dixie Dew guests got china cups and saucers. Kitchen people got mugs, beakers the British called them. They actually kept coffee hot longer.

“Looked empty when I drove by,” Ida Plum said. “Not a thing was flapping from the limbs.” The three of us shook our heads. Reba liked to air her laundry on the limbs. Clean or dirty, she flew it like flags.

We drank coffee, standing at the center island, until I said, “If you two will sit down, I'll tell you what happened last night and how I came very close to not being here this morning.”

“Tell,” Malinda said. “I just hope it doesn't involve slime pits.” She was referring to one of our former unpleasant explorations.

“No slime pits,” I said, “just a root cellar from hell.”

They took chairs at the table and waited while I told of my latest escape, my triumph over terror—not to mention how I never planned to darken another root cellar the rest of my sweet little newly renewed life.

“Nothing broken?” Ida Plum asked politely, but her tone said “you idiot.” “Oh, you give me such worry and grief and I wish your grandmother were here to scold you. What in the world ever possessed you to go into that house?”

Malinda rolled her eyes. She knew me and she also knew if I'd called her she would have gone in with me. Malinda was always open for an adventure and Littleboro didn't offer a lot of them. I tried to describe Verna's house inside.

“So old Verna is a hoarder.” Malinda laughed. “Who would have thought it? Or who would have thought otherwise? One look at the house on the outside and you'd know it. My mama makes sure her front walk is swept every day. She's even taught Elvis to handle a broom. She says a lot more people see the outside of your house than will ever see the inside and you better keep it clean.”

“Good boy,” Ida Plum said. “And good mama.” She patted Malinda on the head. “Both of you.”

“I had to make my bed every morning before school,” Malinda said, spreading jam on her toast. “My mama believes in tough love.”

I wondered what kind of mother Verna would have been if she'd had children. Or what it would be like if that house were filled with the ghosts and voices of children and children's children instead of crap? What I saw sure was crap. To the ceiling. Wall-to-wall crap. Front-door-to-back-door crap. Downstairs-to-upstairs crap, though I hadn't gone upstairs. Some things you know without seeing.

“I can't believe Verna lives in such a mess.” Ida Plum poured us more coffee. “Nobody could, would live that way if it's as bad as you say.” She raised one eyebrow at me. “It's not healthy.”

“It's worse,” I said. “A fire hazard. Mold. Dirt. It's where dirt goes to die. Couple of dump trucks need to haul that unbelievable houseful of god-awful away to the nearest landfill.”

All this had gotten us off the subject of Crazy Reba's jailbreak and my crawling-out-the-window caper. “You don't believe me?” I said to Ida Plum. “Come on. I'll show you.”

Malinda stood, brushed crumbs off her white lab coat. “I'm not taking a chance on getting near any of that … bleeping awfulness.” She hesitated long enough I knew she wanted to say the word that was the perfect description of the contents of Verna's house. I also knew it was a word Ida Plum considered beneath both Malinda and me to use. Not to mention Ida Plum's own vocabulary. So I didn't fill in the blank for her.

She waved goodbye and was gone in a flash of white.

Ida Plum looked at the clock. “We got time if you are bound and determined to show me what I think can't possibly be as bad as you say.”

She liked to challenge my imagination at times. Rein me in, she'd say, when I got too carried away or too excited. “Hold your horses,” she also liked to say. Maybe that's what I should have said to Reba when she was hysterical, except that guy's body was enough to make anyone hysterical. I was surprised I could be so calm myself. But then this wasn't my situation. The crusty, hairy, smelly guy on the picnic table certainly wasn't the man in the driver's license photo. And DMV photos didn't lie, or get “enhanced” in any way, did they? A real puzzler, with Reba, me and Mrs. Angry Truck Driver Wife all involved. Life just couldn't stay simple, could it? It was so complicated right now it made me dizzy. Or the dizziness could have been from mold in that root cellar, and here I was going back into the house of mold, but this time I was staying upstairs.

 

Chapter Eighteen

Before our foray next door, just in case some Dixie Dew guest should decide to wander downstairs before the appointed hour, I made more coffee and put it on the warmer in the dining room. Ida Plum took in the toaster, bread and jam. I felt we had the bases covered for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, which was longer than I wanted to be in Verna's house.

We pushed our way through hedges that hadn't been trimmed in years, grass up to our knees, stepped past the window that had been my escape from the root cellar and on up the rickety back porch steps. At least there were rails on each side, rails that seemed loose from the very steps they were supposed to anchor. They wobbled under my hands. Verna could have grabbed one and gone tumbling over if she ever used them. I guessed she'd decided to go and come from the front door long ago.

The screen door was only half-screened with the lower part loose and curled. And the back porch was full of old clothes and stacks of yellowed newspapers. Cans, bottles and jars gathered in a corner, unwashed. The ones I'd seen earlier in the garbage can had been clean.

Ida Plum held her hand over her nose and mouth. I led her to the kitchen, which in some ways was not as bad as some of the other “awfulness.” It was full of empty frozen food boxes and plastic containers. Here the containers had been washed and stacked up according to shape and size. That was interesting. A bit of order. But the stacks reached the bottoms of all the cabinets and covered the countertops. Verna had made an attempt at recycling, bless her untidy little heart. We wove our way down a narrow path into the next room and the next.

For all I knew, whoever had locked me in the root cellar could be back in the house. But with Ida Plum we were two against one. Between us, with me still smarting about being shut in such a place, my anger would boil up and we could take the rascal. If it had been meant as a prank, and I didn't think it was, it wasn't funny. The person could have been planning to come back later and let me out. Or not! Ever! I shivered at the thought. So here I was back at the scene of the horror, but not quite. With Ida Plum I felt confident, come hell or whatever else. I didn't say this, but I squared my shoulders and we pushed on, threading our way through what seemed like a tunnel. I kept my arms close to my sides for fear that if I brushed against a stack of stuff it would come tumbling down on me. I'd be as buried in this rubble as I almost was in the root cellar.

“How does she live in this house?” Ida Plum whispered.

“I don't know,” I whispered back, even though I didn't know I was whispering. Or
why
we were both whispering.

“Where?” Ida Plum said in a normal voice. “Where does she live in this house? Which room?”

“I wish I'd brought a flashlight,” I said. The hall was dark and several of the rooms so full we couldn't push open the doors. In a way I was thankful we couldn't get in or even see in. This house was a landfill inside! One's own personal landfill and Verna was living in it.

“She must sleep upstairs,” I said, and started up a path narrowed by stacks of books on each step. “Careful.” I reached a hand back to Ida Plum.

The upstairs hall landing had a bit more room to move once we got past some bureaus and chests. On one hall chest a lamp burned. A flicker of hope, I thought, in this upper level of Verna's hell.

Three doors down we saw a door that seemed to be slightly open.

“There,” I said. “That must be her bedroom.”

Ida Plum said, “She surely can't come back to this house. With an injured ankle, she'd never be able to climb these stairs.”

We heard something that sounded like faraway music, very dim, very faint. We looked at each other.

“That room?” I pointed. “It must be coming from there.”

We edged closer. On tiptoe.

I eased the door open wider and saw someone sitting upright in bed, a huge old four-poster, tester bed, with a crocheted netting canopy on top. The woman in the bed looked like one of those pictures in a child's storybook of Little Red Riding Hood, the grandmother or the wolf in ruffled nightcap and bedclothes. A small TV flickered on a dresser across the room.

The person in the bed turned toward us, waved an arm as if to say, “Come in. Come in.”

It wasn't a wolf in grandma's clothing. It was Reba!

“Reba?” I croaked out. “Reba?”

Ida Plum grabbed my elbow. “Is that you? Reba?”

Reba sat like royalty, a dozen pillows propped behind her. Had it been Reba who shut that cellar door and ignored my knocking and calling? The Reba I knew, the old Reba, would have opened that door in a minute.

This Reba was eating something. Something white and tall that looked sticky. She licked her fingers. “Good,” she said. “Good cake.”

It looked like her wedding cake, the one I'd baked to practice for Ossie and Juanita's
real
wedding. Reba's was going to just be for a party where she could wear her white dress and we'd all pretend there had been a wedding. All she'd know was party and cake, but here she was helping herself to the cake ahead of time.

The cake I had slaved over for two whole days, making icing roses and swirls and scrolls and scallops. Even if we knew Reba's wedding was never going to come off, I figured we could eat cake and I'd know what had and hadn't worked when it came time to make the one for Ossie and Juanita. Never hurt to practice something that in the past I'd mostly only watched my grandmother do.

“How did you get here?” I asked.

Reba walked two fingers down the faded wedding ring quilt, sewn in a beautiful old pattern of pinks and blues. I thought, How appropriate. Of course Reba wouldn't know the pattern. I was glad I had not made the cake chocolate.

Reba slid the covers back and got out of bed. “You want some cake?” She wore one of Verna's long nightgowns and a ruffled shower cap on her head.

“When did you get here?” I asked. Reba's could have been the footsteps I heard when someone shot that bolt in the lock and trapped me in the root cellar.

“I found the key, the key, the key and unlocked. I unlocked.” She clapped her hands. She was into locks and keys these days. Like a child locking and unlocking a door, it was a game to her. I wondered if this was the first time she had unlocked a house to get in. Mostly she went in unlocked doors and until lately that had been most of the doors in Littleboro.

“I put cake down, unlocked the key.” She danced around on bare feet.

Maybe that was when I was in the root cellar. Had she been the one to bolt the door? Locks and keys were one thing, but a bolt was another. And if she hadn't done it, who did?

And she had sometime gotten into the Dixie Dew and stolen her wedding cake. I had baked five layers, iced them, had the whole kitchen at the Dixie Dew white with powdered sugar and every surface tacky as glue. Then I decorated. I made white icing roses, sixty of them. Now half of them were smeared across Reba's face and hands and how many were on Verna's quilt? I didn't want to know. I only knew I wanted to reach over and shake Reba by her shoulders. But of course she had no idea all that had gone into that “good cake.” At least she was enjoying it.

“Where? Where did you get that cake?” I asked.

Ida Plum stepped closer to the bed. “I put that thing in the freezer yesterday. No sense wasting good cake and all that work. Somebody in Littleboro would be getting married sometime.”